Comfort Zone

My anxiety is like a box.

It started out the size of a room. It had windows, and a door. I called it my comfort zone. My fears stayed right outside the door, and I was safe. When I was in my comfort zone, I thrived on routine and structure and having things just so.

The thing about anxiety though, is that it isn’t stagnant.

The more time I spent in my comfort zone, the more I wanted to be there. Even when the box started to shrink, just a little at a time, it became more comfortable to be comfortable than to take the risk of crossing that boundary.

I went from visiting my comfort zone on a regular basis to moving in and calling it home. Meanwhile, my fears lurked outside the shrinking door and piled up at the windows. The funny thing about my fears is that they quickly compounded. They got bigger, they got scarier, they even multiplied.

My comfort zone was getting less and less comfortable, and began closing in around me.

When your comfort zone becomes your prison, it’s not comfortable anymore.

And that’s when I learned one of the hardest lessons of my life – the lesson of anxiety. The more you give in to it, the bigger it becomes. Faulty logic told me that if I avoided my fears than I could avoid my anxiety.

It seems like a simple enough equation: If I have a fear of reptiles, and so I avoid reptiles, than I can avoid my fear of reptiles, right?

Wrong.

Because anxiety is bigger than reptiles: It’s driving, it’s socializing, it’s leaving the house. It’s looking for a job, it’s failing at work, it’s too insecure for love.

It’s suffocating, it’s terrifying, it’s all-consuming.

Unless.

Unless I ignore my faulty logic and lean into my fears. If I can break out of the sludge holding me down, I can take a step forward – even a tiny one. And with each step I take, I tell my anxiety to take a hike.

So now, every day, I try to do one thing that scares me. Some days, it’s a really, really small thing – as small as picking up the phone to make an uncomfortable call. Other days, it’s changing careers.

The point is that I’ve moved out of my comfort zone. I’m back to visiting it every once in a while. We all need that – a safe space to regroup, as I spoke about here.

Finding the balance between giving in and fighting back has become the core of my anxiety management.

What about you? Have you ever dealt with anxiety in this way before? What are some tips that have helped you? I’d love to hear your thoughts – share below!

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